Kavitha conspired with Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia to get favours in Delhi excise policy: Enforcement Directorate

New Delhi, March 18

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BRS leader K Kavitha and some others “conspired” with top AAP leaders, including Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, to get favours in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy by paying Rs 100 crore to the political party that rules Delhi, the Enforcement Directorate alleged on Monday.

Forty-six-year-old Kavitha, the MLC daughter of former Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao, was arrested by the federal agency last week from her Hyderabad home and she is in the ED custody till March 23.

Probe found, the ED claimed in a statement, that Kavitha along with others “conspired with the top leaders of AAP including Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia for getting favours in the Delhi excise policy-formulation and implementation”.

“In exchange of these favours, she was involved in paying Rs 100 crore to the leaders of AAP,” the agency said.

By the acts of “corruption and conspiracy” in the formulation and implementation of the Delhi excise policy 2021-22, a continuous stream of illegal funds in the form of kickback from the wholesalers was generated for the AAP, it said.

It alleged “Kavitha and her associates were to recover the proceeds of crime paid in advance to AAP and to further generate profits/proceeds of crime from this entire conspiracy.”

The agency, while seeking the remand of Kavitha last week, told the special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court that she was “one of the kingpins, a key conspirator and beneficiary of the Delhi excise policy scam”.

Kavitha asserted earlier that she had done nothing wrong and alleged that the Centre was “using” the ED as the BJP could not gain a “backdoor entry” into Telangana.

The Aam Aadmi Party has alleged that the BJP was using the ED and CBI as its “goons” to finish off political opponents.